Is the system administrator an endangered species, about to join company with the African wild dog, Bornean orangutan, and the black-footed ferret?

One experienced systems administrator doesn’t think so, but it will require refocusing on the major changes taking place in the information technology industry. Automation and the rise of developer operations are just a couple of the factors changing the skills landscape.

“If I can automate the routine tasks, deploying an application, patching an application, bringing things up and down when there’s some sort of failure, then I’m going to naturally grow my career by getting rid of the boring stuff,” said Jonathan Frappier (pictured), of vBrownBag, a community training podcast for the IT infrastructure community. “Automate yourself into your next job is the way I think about it versus automating yourself out.”

Frappier spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VTUG Winter Warmer event in Foxborough, Massachusetts. They discussed the impact of multicloud solutions on running the business and the importance of delivering value and application support for the enterprise.

Matching tech to business

As the information technology infrastructure takes on a distinct multicloud look, having the skills to balance application workloads in multiple environments becomes essential. Frappier sees this as a simple case of matching the right technology to business need.

“For me, it’s about being able to support what my business is doing,” Frappier said. “Sometimes the right answer is going to be VMware; sometimes it’s going to be physical; sometimes it’s going to be containers or public cloud or new, fancy buzzwords like serverless.”

Meeting the business need also depends significantly on keeping operations running smoothly. “The scales have tipped to focusing more on delivering value versus infrastructure,” Frappier said. “The CFO doesn’t necessarily think or care that spinning up a new virtual machine faster is cool. They care about getting an application to the team so they can do their work.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE